Monthly Archives: September 2009
Has Social Media Reached the Tipping Point?
Consider this: according to Groundswell, in 2009, more than four out of five online Americans are active in either creating, participating in, or reading some form of social content at least once a month.
Social Media Reached a Tipping Point
According to a broad survey of some 1,450 marketers from Equation Research:
* The adoption of social media is well past critical mass–with nearly two thirds of brand marketers (59%) currently implementing social media in their marketing plans
* Facebook, Twitter, online video and blogs are the 4 most popular social media tools. Yet none of these are being used in isolation–on average, there are 5 to 7 other social media tools being either actively used or dabbled with by marketers at the same time
* While traditional media channels account for the largest proportion of marketing spend; Online, Search and Social Media as a group are approximately a third of all current spend. For smaller companies this increased to over 40%
* Looking towards 2010, brand marketers forecast a shift in spend towards digital tactics, feeling the areas most likely to increase will be Social Media (60%), Online Advertising (53%), Search Engine Advertising (49%) and Email Marketing (41%).
While it is easy to get all excited looking at the stats above, I want to offer some cautious optimism here. There is little doubt that social media is here to stay. At the same time, it is important to realize that Social Media comprises less than 3% of the current digital spend.
The biggest barrier to adoption has been the lack of metrics to measure the effectiveness and ROI on Social Media campaigns. Once we figure out the problem of attribution, the growth curve for social media is going to look even more steep.
I offer 2 posts that focus on the ROI challenge
- Monetizing Social Networks: will attribution be the answer?
- Monetizing Social Networks- what will the privacy advocates say?
Do you think social media has become mainstream? I look forward to your thoughts.
Newssift: the new business search engine? Not yet…
I recently came across Newssift: it is a semantic search engine for business. The tool is still in beta and is definitely a good start to semantic search. I read a lot of positive buzz about the engine and some calling it better than google. But the company has to fix some kinks if it has to become the destination for business search.
A search on H1N1 virus yields about 8500 results. Interestingly, about 600 (7%) of the results are positive. Intrigued, I click more. The first 2 results are the following
- Its so cool for H1N1 virus in Bangalore: the article talks about the cool city temperature and how that is a favorable factor for survival of the virus. Apparently, the algorithm picked up words like “cool” and “favorable” and assigned a positive sentiment to the article.
- Colombia president catches H1N1 flu: a news article that states that the Columbian President Alvaro Uribe has caught the swine flu. I was surprised that this is categorized as positive. The only rationale could be that further in the news the article states that “Doctors say Uribe is being treated and he is progressing satisfactorily.”
There were 2 more results on the second page (Other results on the first page were on target)
- Despite H1N1 threat, most Americans haven’t increased hand washing: the article that states that 54 percent of the people surveyed said they “wash their hands no more or less frequently” in public restrooms since the H1N1 virus emerged.
- Kids going back to school will cart H1N1 with them: you look at the heading of the news and think how can this be positive?
That said, I like Newssift for the fact that I can view results by timeframe and the firm offers a unique way to classify information and search results. Let’s give it a little more time and input to fine tune the kinks.